


Viral Video

by ryfkah



Series: Clone Wars campaign [5]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Post-Order 66, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, background Saw Gerrera, exes team up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:54:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22249738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryfkah/pseuds/ryfkah
Summary: Help his brothers, or avenge them: those have always been the choices, and he can’t see any others. No matter how he changes on the outside, the inside of him is always shaped like a clone soldier.
Series: Clone Wars campaign [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1592614
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11





	Viral Video

**Author's Note:**

> Fic for a Star Wars RPG campaign played between 2017-2018 that devastated all participants ([Lexie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexie/pseuds/Lexie), [sandrylene](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandrylene), [varadia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/varadia), [genarti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/genarti) and GM [jothra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jothra)) enough that we all went on to write ... many thousands of words of fic about stray clones. This fic, like the previous in this series, takes place after Order 66 left most of the party miraculously alive, but scattered, confused, and sad! For more context, check out Lexie's [character primer](https://wakeupnew.tumblr.com/post/190072369169/so-my-tabletop-group-played-a-clone-wars-campaign) and [Clone Wars campaign](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1592614) series.

At first, he thinks he’ll stick it out.

Sure, the GAR – the Imperial Army, whatever it’s calling itself now – is rotten through and through. If Bash had his way, the whole thing would go up in flames tomorrow, and take the Emperor and the Galactic Senate with it. 

Still, it’s where his brothers are, and what can he do for them if he’s not with them? It won’t be so hard, he thinks, to play toy soldier and stand at attention while he figures out what to do next. He’ll keep track of Boomer and Target, and he’ll sound out his new squad here on Onderan to see if any of them might be feeling as split as he’d been before Dax found him, and then –

Honestly, he’s not really quite sure what he’ll do then. Boomer and Target are both still deep in Imperial space. Even reaching them for a visit is probably beyond his solo capabilities, let alone figuring out how to get the chips out of their heads. As for helping out any of the men here on base, forget it; what’s he going to do, knock them out and attempt brain surgery with his own two bashed-up hands? 

If he could just talk it through with somebody, they could come up with some kind of plan. He’s always worked well as part of a team. But Dax is out in deep space hunting for Knight Tai, and until that quest is through, a supportive-but-cryptic word or two through the Force is all Bash is gonna get from him. And even if he could set up a safe comm channel to Boomer or Target – 

Honestly, even if he could talk to them face-to-face, he’s not sure what he would say. He’s not really sure which is worse: the thought of Boomer or Target looking at him like he’s a traitor they can’t trust, or the knowledge that until the fucking chips are out of their heads, he’s the one who can’t trust them. 

But he’ll get to them soon, he tells himself. He’ll figure it all out soon. Dax will come back, or one of the others will get assigned somewhere reachable, and everything will fall into place. 

In the meantime, he sends innocuous messages when he can, through the slow official comm channels: jungle’s a menace, wish you were here. He cleans his armor, and goes out on patrol, and posts up propaganda. He greets his chipped brothers every day with a joke and a smile, and tries not to think too hard about what percentage of what they say is _them_ , and how much is the thing in their head that controls what they can think. 

At night, he monitors the hacked back-channel that feeds him a steady stream of Army personnel records. The data is awfully messy, but he can just about keep track of his friend’s locations. When the time comes, he’ll be ready.

And then, while looking through reassignment details, he finds a different kind of report. 

Target’s been caught in an exploding building. 

It’s not a death certificate, just a missing-presumed. The body was never found, which means maybe it’s not what it looks like. Maybe Target used the accident as a way to get out, just like Dax did before him. Target’s smart enough for that. It’s not hopeless. 

He tells himself all of that, over and over, but the truth is unavoidable: Bash waited too long. 

The next day, when he goes to mess, his squadmate Gab is retelling the tale of how he executed his Jedi General almost very nearly singlehandedly. Bash has heard this story about five times already. If you’re judging in terms of technique, rather than how much it makes you want to throw up, it gets better every time. 

Bash listens all the way to the end, and applauds with the rest. He’s pretty sure his laughter isn’t any more convincing than it was the last four times, but it’s not like anyone’s paying particular attention to him while Gab’s carrying the show. 

Then he goes to the armory, throws as much weaponry as he can carry into a duffel bag, and walks out the garrison’s front door. 

Maybe it’s giving up his duty, and maybe it’s abandoning his brothers, but he can’t be alone like this anymore. He just can’t. 

**

Everyone on Onderon knows what a clone looks like. After the past few years, it seems likely that just about everyone everywhere knows what a clone looks like. Now that peace has semi-officially descended, he’s even heard people calling the whole mess the Clone Wars – like he and his brothers were somehow responsible for the mess that made them, which is such an astounding piece of bullshit that it almost comes round to being funny again. 

Anyway. Imperial weaponry isn’t all that great, but there’s always someone out there who’s ready to buy a gun or fifteen. Bash heads into Malgan Market, and comes out with enough cash for a down payment on a brand new face. 

It’s not like it’s the first time he’s ever considered this. Even back in the early days, on his first solo info-gathering missions, he’d occasionally look at the infinite variety of faces around him, and wonder: what if?

And then he’d think about the others, and all the hundreds of ways they made themselves themselves – not just dye and paint and tattoos, but stance, voice, expression, name, dreams – and his pride in being one of them, part of them, would immediately chase the fleeting thought away. Maybe their face had been pre-determined, just like everything else about their lives, but his brothers had made it a face worth having. Changing it would be cheapening everything they’d made of themselves. It would be a betrayal. 

It is a betrayal. But there have been a lot of those flying around recently, and there’s no point in walking away from everything he ever cared about unless he’s willing to go all the way. 

“So are we going for here?” asks the nanotechnician, as Bash sits down in the chair for the procedure. He politely does not comment on the fact that Bash is obviously a clone deserter, and Bash is certainly not going to be the one to bring it up. “Dathomiri? Pantoran? I know this is a rush job, but if you really don’t want to be recognized, a full dermal change does wonders –”

“Human is fine,” says Bash. He’s pretty sure he can’t base an entire Pantoran backstory on Dax’s occasional dreamy Ranger Luma-related non sequiturs. 

“Hm,” says the tech, disapproving but noncommital. Bash suspects he was hoping to charge him more for the full species swap. “OK, well, any requests as far as the look goes? I’ll be honest, I do better at good-looking Bivall than good-looking human, but if you’re hoping for handsome I’ll give it my best shot.”

The idea of designing a new face that’s _better-looking_ than the old one makes his stomach twist. “Just make it look different,” he rumbles – and he’s going to have to change the accent, too, after this, isn’t he? “That’s really all I need.” 

After the operation, the nanotechnician holds up a mirror to show him his new face.

It’s … not great. It’s fine. He’ll probably get used to it eventually. 

“I think you got my brother-in-law’s nose,” says the nanotechnician, cheerfully. “Can’t say I planned on that, but he was pretty annoying this morning, and I guess it kind of stuck in my head.”

Bash is fairly sure this is information he didn’t actually want, but oh well, too late now. Anyway, if you go to illegal underground facial modification techs, you expect to take what you get. “Thanks,” he says, politely, goes to pick up his duffel, then pauses and turns around again. “Hey, before I leave – do you have any recommendations for a good tattoo artist around here?” 

Unlike most of the others, he'd never gotten himself any tattoos before – none except the squad snekfruit on the inside of his wrist, and that had been more in the way of a social activity than a personal statement. A tattoo is supposed to say something about who you are. Bash had never quite gotten around to figuring out what he personally wanted to say. 

Now, though --

After a few sessions, the tattoos spiral up both his arms past to the elbow, shapes splotched in and around and over each other. An ashrabbit, a deck of cards, a pair of knitting needles. An explosion blooming into a flower. A set of abstract figures in meditation forms, one topped with a splash of bright blue hair. A paintbrush. A toolkit. The round eye of a holocam. 

It takes him weeks to get everything, and even then he’s still pretty sure he’s not done. 

No rifles. No helmets. Nothing that could possibly make anyone who might be looking think a single thought about the Grand Army of the Republic, but maybe that limitation's not such a bad thing. They were always more than their weapons anyway. 

He won't carry his brothers on his face anymore, but that doesn't mean he'll stop carrying them. 

**

Every clone trooper on Onderon knows which bars are the anti-Imperial ones. They’re the ones you never go into, unless you’re spoiling for a fight.

Armed with his new face, Bash picks the loudest one and becomes a regular. 

He chats with strangers about the weather and the drinks and how much he loves his tattoo artist. He buys rounds, but not so many as to be suspicious. He doesn’t stir shit, but when there’s anti-Imperial shit being stirred, he seconds the sentiment with a fervor that he hopes will get him noticed, and that also happens to be exactly how he feels. Bash never was particularly great at lying. 

This goes on for a month or two. He’s picked up a part-time job hauling scrap for a junkyard, but he’s never had to manage money before, and it seems to pour out his fingers as soon as he gets it. Pretty soon he’s going to have to stop buying rounds. 

He’s sitting in the bar after joining in a toast that’s just-this-side of treasonous, wondering how much more obvious he needs to start being, when an Onderan Twi’lek settles himself at the table across from him. 

“You’re awfully loud, pal,” says the Twi’lek. 

“I mean,” Bash says. “This seems like the kind of place where it’s okay to be a little loud. But tell me if I’m wrong. I wouldn’t want to bother people.”

“If it’s that hard to keep quiet, something must really be eating you,” says the Twi’lek. 

Bash leans back. “You really want to hear the whole tragic story, buddy?” 

“I’m just curious, is all.” The Twi’lek shrugs. “I mean – no offense, but the Empire’s been around all of ten minutes. How tragic can the story possibly get?”

Bash can feel the sharpness of their eyes under their broad-brimmed hat, and brings his gaze up to meet theirs. He’s never been a great liar, but, he reminds himself, he really doesn’t need to lie for this. “The Empire, the Republic – I don’t care what they’re calling themselves today. It’s the same kriffing thing as yesterday, isn’t it?”

“Oh? Separatist, then?” 

“As far as I can tell,” says Bash, “that’s the same thing too.” He takes a gulp of his drink. “I used to fight with the Republic, you know. Like a lot of people on this planet, I guess. But they lied to me, and they lied to my – they lied to my people. They used us, and threw us away. They killed my brothers --”

He breaks off, and then says it again, more slowly. “They killed my brother.”

He’s changed his face. Most of his brothers aren’t his brothers anymore. It has to be that way, if he’s going to pass; most non-clones, he’s given to understand, have a finite number.

But Cog will always be his brother, if anyone is.

“They stole my brother from himself, and they killed him. They stole my whole family, and they didn’t think any of us could do a kriffing thing about it.” 

And maybe he can’t, after all. He takes a breath and leans back, staring out the window at the dark Onderan sky and the stars beyond. Countless planets; countless troops. Countless ships. Countless chips.

Countless clones, who all count to somebody, if only each other. Until that gets taken from them, too. 

“Who’s ‘us’?” says the Onderan, and Bash jerks his gaze hastily back down again to the Twi’lek’s.

“The, uh, my family. The Snekfruit Clan.”

“Snekfruit Clan,” echoes the Twi’lek.

“Yep,” says Bash. 

“And your name’s … Snekfruit Bash.”

“That’s right.” 

“I’ve never heard of a Snekfruit Clan.”

“We were pretty obscure,” Bash says. “Even before, you know.” He shrugs, and looks down at his near-empty glass. “Look, if you want more details, I’ll give you more details, but you’re really going to have to buy me another drink first. This is all still kind of fresh.”

It’s hard to tell under the big floppy hat, but Bash is pretty sure the Twi’lek is raising an eyebrow. “If it’s that painful, I’m surprised you’re so willing to talk about it at all.”

At that, Bash can’t help but laugh. “Oh – you got it all wrong there, buddy. Talking about it isn’t the problem. The hard part is staying quiet. I’d walk down the street with a loudspeaker if I thought it would do any good. I’d blast it out on the Holonet.” He drains his drink, and puts it down hard on the table. 

Forget lying. Snekfruit Clan aside, this is the most honest conversation he’s had since Dax left.

“Friend,” says the Twi’lek, after a moment, “did anyone ever tell you that actions speak louder than words?” 

“Can’t say I have,” says Bash, “but I kind of like the ring of it.” 

The Twi’lek leans closer. “If you can keep your mouth shut for the week or so, I’ll introduce you to someone who’s making a bigger shout against the Empire than you’ve ever heard. But you can’t do both, you understand? Here in this bar, they’re big on words. My friends, we prefer action. What will you pick?”

“I’m a talker, honestly,” says Bash. “If we’re going to be friends, you should know that about me. But I can talk about anything. Doesn’t have to be this particular topic. When it comes to this particular topic, if your friends have something better in mind --” 

He grins. It stretches his new mouth in unfamiliar ways. He’s not sure any of his friends would recognize it, and not just because of the face.

Well, Knight Tai might.

“Buddy, I’m all ears.”

**

In a lot of ways, life in Saw Gerrera’s camp is exactly what Bash is used to.

He doesn’t need to worry about money anymore, or setting his own schedule, or making any kind of plans on his own. That’s … fine. Maybe not one hundred percent what he’d expected, when he’d vaguely envisioned what life might be like as anti-Imperial terrorist, but fine. It’s not like he managed to achieve anything during those few months he was supposed to be making his own plans anyway. If he can play a role in somebody else’s grand design, somebody who actually knows what they’re doing, that’s probably for the best. 

And he does have a role to play. He’s a skilled asset, here in the camp. He turns old scrap into grenades, and hands them off to other people to use. Every time he finishes one, he misses Boomer’s grin, but it’s good to know that he’s doing something useful. Gerrera’s people don’t fully trust him, yet – hence the fact that he’s not going along on any of the missions involving grenades – but they like him, and he likes them. They’ve spent the last few years fighting a different kind of war than he has, but they’ve all been fighting. They all know what it feels like to be betrayed by their own. 

It’s not the same as being surrounded by brothers. It’s nothing like that. It’s still light-years better than being surrounded by brothers and also having to lie to them every minute of the day. He tells the people around him as few lies as he can, although this is still definitely a non-zero number of lies. 

So he has a purpose, and he has comrades. What he doesn’t have is access to the Holonet, or even the regular subspace comms. Of course you can’t expect all the amenities when you’re part of a guerrilla faction hiding from the authorities, but at first it drives him a little wild all the same. Maintaining a consistent channel into Army personnel records from within an Army facility was tricky, but doable. Keeping track of Boomer’s whereabouts from the middle of a pile of jungle ruins, it turns out, is more or less impossible.

But it’s too late for second thoughts now. 

When he finally gets too antsy to stand it any longer, he talks his new friend Jordy the Twi’lek into taking him along on a brief trip into town so he can visit his tattoo artist. Then he talks his tattoo artist into letting him borrow her her portable computer for a few minutes. It’s not enough time to hack back into Imperial systems, and anyway, it would be a dick move to risk getting poor Korel in trouble, but there’s nothing illegal about blasting out a quick voice-only message:

_I’m OK. I’m out. Still on Onderon. I’ll try to be in touch soon._

It goes to Yasmeen, to Luma, and to Shiri, though he’s fairly sure she won’t read it; he gave up on hopes of that after the first three denied calls. It goes to Bash’s best guess at Leeadra’s address. And it goes – without much expectation that it will serve much of a purpose, but he has to try, you’ve got to keep trying – to a private channel he’d set up only to be accessed by H1F1. 

You’ve got to keep trying, or none of it meant anything. 

“So?” Jordy demands, when they pick up Bash outside the tattoo parlor to take him the long, winding way back to the encampment. “What’s the new one?” 

Bash rolls up his sleeve to show him the meditation tattoos. The bright blue hair on the third figure has now been colored a vivid purple. 

Jordy eyeballs him. “Is this some Snekfruit clan thing?” 

Bash laughs. “It’s a Target thing. My brother. He used to go through enough hair dye annually to drown a rancor.” 

“Is he ever gonna see it?” 

Bash is pretty sure this is Jordy’s attempt at tactfully asking if Target is one of the alive brothers, or one of the dead ones. “I don’t know,” he says, answering both questions, and pulls his sleeve down again. “I hope so.”

**

He’s trying to piece together some extra bits of scrap into something that might compensate for his dex problems – a problem that, of course, would be much easier to solve if he didn’t have dex problems –when he feels the Force-touch from Dax

Bash is pretty sure he’s less Force-sensitive than most rocks. The rare occasions when Knight Tai talked directly into his head all counted among the top weirdest experiences of a life that has, even by clone standards, been pretty consistently weird. 

The feeling of Dax in his head – like a tap on a mental shoulder he knows he doesn’t have – is also incredibly weird. But also, Dax is his brother, and so in another way this wordless contact is one of the most familiar things he’s felt in a long, long time. For a moment he’s so overwhelmed by the feeling of not-aloneness – once so constant, now so rare it’s almost unbearable – that it takes him a moment to register the actual images Dax is sending: Knight Tai, swathed in black. A green claw, clenched on a doorframe. The ripples of the Force. 

Bash isn’t sure he entirely understands everything that happened, but it’s enough to get the gist: she’s alive, but she’s not okay. Alive, but she wouldn’t come. 

She’s not going to come grab him from Onderon, with H1F1 on her shoulder and some kind of brilliant Jedi revenge plan for him to follow, no big decisions or second thoughts required. He hadn’t even realized that was a daydream he’d had until it vanishes from possibility. Later he’ll be able to laugh at himself about it – what a kriffing typical clone way to think! – but it’s going to be a little while in coming. 

Still. It could be worse. She’s alive, and alive is something. Start with alive, and you can get somewhere with the rest.

The series of images, stumble-running along like Dax’s speech always does when he’s feeling a lot of things, comes to an end and wraps itself up in the shape of a question: _THAT’S HOW IT IS HERE. YOU?_

Bash braces himself, musters up an image of the missing-presumed report he found, and mentally shoves it as hard as he can back at Dax.

The answer, when it comes back, almost brings him to his knees with how unexpected it is: ALIVE.

Alive. Target’s _alive._

Bash scrubs his eyes. They’re two for two. No way this luck is holding, but he tries for one more. _BOOMER?_

_ALIVE._

The breath comes out of him in a whoosh. 

They might all be scattered, but everyone who left that planet alive is still alive, and what were the odds of that? 

Dax. Boomer. Target. Knight Tai – though there was something Bash didn’t see in the series of images Dax sent... 

_...H1F1?_

And this time, for the first time, a hesitation – followed by something that feels an awful lot like an apologetic shrug. Dax has no idea. 

_AW, COME ON, DAX!_

The connection is starting to get weaker by now, but Bash can clearly feel the question that Dax shoves back at him, for the second time: _YOU?_

They don’t have much more time. What’s most important for Dax to know?

Nothing about Saw Gerrera and the Partisans, who would probably not appreciate having their identity and activities broadcast out on a clone Force hotline. Nothing about the loneliness or the second thoughts – they’re not that important, because Bash isn’t going to let them be. 

Definitely not anything about Bash’s face. Nobody needs to know about that just yet. 

Bash thinks for a second, and then, carefully, selects an image: his hands putting together a grenade. Satisfaction. Purpose.

 _DON’T WORRY_ , he tries his best to convey, through the fuzzy medium of the Force. _I’M GETTING THEM BACK FOR ALL OF US._

For a second, it’s almost like he can see Dax flinch backwards. But whatever that feeling is fades away as quickly as it appears, replaced by a veritable flood of _not-aloneness_ , comradeship, love. 

That last push is clearly as much as Dax has strength for. With lingering sense of affection and apology, the feeling of his mind fades away, leaving Bash with a splitting headache and, despite everything, a heart lighter than he’s had for months. 

They’re all alive. Isn’t that something?

** 

“What the hell are _those?_ ” says Jordy, when Bash comes out of his workshop the next day.

“Extenders,” says Bash, and flexes the skeletal metal-and-wire structures attached to the ends of his hands. “Fake fingers, basically. Give me a little more range of motion. Faster typing! Not that there’s anything to hack out here, but someday it’ll come in handy.”

“Handy?” says Jordy. “ _Handy_. Tell me you didn’t just.” 

Bash flexes the extenders again, mostly to get Jordy to make the face that they make. 

“You know they look like something out of a horror holo, right?”

Bash grins. “Function over form, buddy.” 

“What’s wrong with making some kind of little droid guy like the one you won’t shut up about?”

“Gerrera hates droids,” says Bash, “you know that. Anyway, what’d I do when I get H1F1 back? Tell him I built a replacement for him? That would be the worst, man, I couldn’t do that to him.” 

Jordy snorts. “You’re that sure you’re getting him back, huh?” 

Bash is, honestly, not sure at all. 

But if you start with alive, you can get somewhere with the rest.

“Yeah,” he says, and refuses to allow any doubt to enter his voice. “I’m that sure.”

***

Three months go by. Six. Nine.

Just as they all did in the army, Bash falls into patterns. 

He makes grenades. He makes them more and faster now, though his finger extensions malfunction on the regular: partly the lack of equipment, and partly his own clumsiness in putting them together to begin with. It doesn’t bother him much. Tinkering with them gives him something else to do. 

He can’t watch most of the videos he downloaded from Yasmin’s datastore. Oh, one or two of them are fine – there’s a video he recorded of Shiri talking about civil engineering that has now become part of the standard training for some of the guerrilla groups who are more involved with destroying bridges and infrastructure – but there’s not exactly a ton of personal space in Gerrera’s jungle ruins. He’s really not sure how he would even try to explain all the clone trooper footage if someone walked in on him while he was indulging in a nostalgia trip, but he’s pretty sure it wouldn’t go well. 

So he doesn’t watch, but he’s scrounged a pair of headphones, and sometimes, when he’s feeling low, he turns off the viewscreen and just listens. 

Dax babbling about a deep-sea critter he caught a glimpse of while they were flying over Mon Cala. Boomer teaching Target a new variant on whirlyplate, with frequent interjections from Cog’s Hotkey #6. An interview he recorded with Knight Tai about different meditation techniques.

(“But you’re never going to use them, Bash,” she’d said, and he’d said, “sure, but I’m interested in what you think about them, this could be an important historical document, sir,” and she’d coughed in a way that was almost a laugh. He listens a lot to the clips where all of them laugh.)

There are things he misses, of course, having only the audio. Target flushing, Cog rolling his eyes, swift hand-signs of _joke_ – not being able to see their hands makes Cog feel even further away than he already does. Still, it helps more than it hurts. It’s better than nothing. 

Every few months, he goes into town, with Jordy as his babysitter, and gets his tattoos touched up. He takes the opportunity to send updates to the same set of addresses: Yasmeen, Luma, Shiri. The second is longer than the first, though not by much. The third one is four pages long – almost a year’s worth of funny stories and cheerful reminiscences, carefully stripped of identifying details and anything that might smack of self-pity. He hopes it’ll make somebody out there laugh. 

As the months pass, the trips get longer, and the tattoos get more elaborate. He keeps coming up with more things he wants to keep with him. 

(“All right,” says Jordy, “now you have thirty hands tattooed on your arm. I’m sure that’s somehow deeply meaningful among the people of the Snekfruit Clan.” 

Bash makes the explosion sign for _Boomer_ , then twists his arm to show the full diagram tattooed on his arm, closed fist bursting into wide-open fingers. “Looks kind of cool, yeah?” 

“Why the bunny ears, though,” says Jordy, and then stops themself, and sighs. “Dax, right?”

Bash grins. “Mostly because of the pets. Not just because you usually had to say his name twice to get him back from cloudcuckooland.”

“I know too much about you, pal,” says Jordy. “I could be using those brain cells for other things.” 

Bash rolls his sleeve back down. “You’re the one who keeps asking. You could just let me be a man of mystery.”

Jordy laughs. “You’re about as mysterious as a bag of cabbages. Is there anyone in the Partisans who _doesn’t_ know all your brothers’ names?”

“I mean,” says Bash, “I’m pretty sure they don’t know all of them.”) 

Before he knows it, more than a year has slipped away. The Partisans get bolder. Gerrera and his men have become involved in smuggling weapons, not just on-planet – Onderon is not particularly important to the Empire, in the grand scheme of things – but farther, where they can do more damage. Bash’s grenades travel to Alpin, Valtt, Salient II. 

Bash doesn’t go with them. Gerrera doesn’t trust anyone who hasn’t proven themselves thoroughly. Bash has been around long enough now that everyone knows his (new) face, but he’s still not a part of any kind of inner circle. 

That changes when the Empire finally decides that enough is enough, and stages a raid on the Partisan’s base on Onderon. 

Everything happens so quickly that Bash barely has time to react. One minute he’s at his workbench, carefully deconstructing an energy cell, and the next second the ruins are full of shouting, blaster fire, white armor – 

“Bash!” someone shouts, and throws him a weapon. He hasn’t had a blaster in his hands for a year. He grabs it, fumbles, takes a better grip, and then runs in the direction of the shooting. He ducks behind a stone outcropping. He raises his blaster, and peers through the sight.

Through the round circle of the target, he sees a trooper’s black faceplate and domed helmet. There’s a scrape of blue along the cheek, as if something had been painted there and then sanded off. 

He shuts his eyes and opens them again. For the first time since the chip came out of his head, his hands are shaking. 

The last time he’d shot at one of his brothers, he’d missed. He mostly hadn’t meant to. Something had been wrong with those men. They were attacking their brothers. They needed to be stopped.

Still, he missed. 

The trooper’s head turns in the other direction, towards the jungle behind him, where Gerrera is shouting out instructions: left, keep cover, take them from behind. The trooper raises his blaster, pauses, adjusts. Bash recognizes the familiar routine: he’s seen Target do the same thing hundreds of times. Of course there’s no way that this could be Target; Target’s not with the army anymore. It just means this trooper was sniper-trained, that’s all. Maybe even Target-trained. 

Bash has always been a terrible shot. What are the odds of him hitting, anyway? 

He squeezes the trigger.

The trooper gives a shout, and falls. 

It’s all pretty much a blur, after that. 

When they count the bodies, at the end of it all, there are twelve dead Partisans, and twenty dead troopers. They’ve fought back the attack, for now. Still, they all know they can’t stay here. The Empire knows where they are, and it won’t leave them alone. 

Gerrera gives his orders: they’re packing up. There’s a new base waiting for them off-planet. Onderon isn’t safe anymore. 

Some of the others protest, at this. They’re Onderon Partisans. They joined up for their planet’s freedom. Their families are here; their lives are here. 

“Form your own group, then,” snaps Gerrera, “and go somewhere else. But we can’t stay here, and neither can you. We leave tomorrow. Get packed tonight.” 

Bash has his whole workbench to pack, and he can’t be both careful and fast. It takes him most of the night. When he finishes, he knows he should probably take the opportunity to catch a few hours of sleep. 

Instead, he goes back over to the pile of Imperial bodies. Not all of them were dead when the fighting ended. Some of them, probably, could have been patched up. But Gerrera doesn’t have a policy of leaving survivors. 

Bash rolls the first body over, and starts tugging off helmets. 

He’s about halfway through the pile when he hears someone walking up behind him. Apparently he’s not the only one who can’t sleep. 

“Snekfruit.”

Bash looks up. 

“What the hell,” says Saw Gerrera.

Bash absolutely can’t think of a convincing lie, so he tells the truth: “I want to remember who I’ve killed.”

In the GAR, this would have been anathema. Clone troopers don’t take trophies. He’s expecting a look of disgust, but Gerrera just snorts. “Don’t flatter yourself. You didn’t exactly take out this whole pile single-handed.” A beat. “But you did all right, Snekfruit. You were good out there.”

Bash nods, and doesn’t say anything, until he feels the heavy weight of Gerrera’s hand on his shoulder. “Be proud of what you did today,” he says. “The Empire’s a little weaker because of you.” 

He lifts the hand, and disappears back into the darkness. 

Bash keeps staring down at the face of the trooper with the blue-smudged helmet. His brother. Not all of them are, in the pile – fewer than he’d expected, to be honest – but this one was. This one is. 

Then he carefully pulls out personal datacom and takes a snap of the trooper’s face, before moving on to the next head. 

It’s not anyone he knows, or ever knew. He’s pretty sure. 

Still, he deserves to be remembered. They all do. 

**

Now that Gerrera has decided that Bash is reliable enough to be out in the field, life is a little bit more exciting. 

Not all days. Lots of days, it’s the same as before: sitting in a bunker on Wrea or a cave on Cathar, making grenades for the Partisans, wherever the Partisans happen to be these days. Frequently, this is not the same place that Saw Gerrera is. Saw Gerrera seems to have an increasing number of irons in the fire. But he’s always got some kind of plan in motion, and most of the time Bash is content enough to play his part in it. 

But then there are other days. On those days, he’s out with Jordy on recruitment and intelligence missions, mingling with the locals in bars on the planets that Gerrera is particularly interested in – which are mostly, of course, the planets that the Empire seems particularly interested in. 

Bash likes this kind of work a lot. Mostly it’s just talking to people about whatever’s important to them, and he’s always been good at that.

There are other parts he’s not particularly good at, but he’s learning a lot along the way. How to set up a secret drop site; how to leave a message in plain sight that will catch the attention of the people you want while sliding under the radar of the people you don’t; how much information to give to someone when you want to help them, but don’t know yet if you can trust them. Hanging around with Jordy is an education.

It’s for a mission like this that he, Jordy, and a few of the other Partisans end up catching a shuttle out to Karideph. Gerrera has decided it’s worth the Partisans’ while to support some of the local freedom fighters in their disruption of cortosis strip-mining operation on Kal’Shebbol. But Kal’Shebbol isn’t great place for setting up a meet-and-greet – too much desert, too many troops – so the two groups are liaising on Karideph, a major economic hub with an extensive system of underground tunnels. 

Obviously, Bash has some memories attached to Kal’Shebbol. He maybe listens to a few more recordings than usual as they’re on the way down. Still, it doesn’t actually occur to him that his past history might be relevant here until they’re standing in a meeting room and Jordy is introducing them to a small group of Twi’lek freedom fighters, one of whom is very definitely Shiri Ovasu.

It’s been more than two years since he’s gotten his new face, and this is the first time he’s been in the same room with anyone who knew the old one. She looks past him without more than a casual glance in his direction, and he stares down at his hands, to stop from staring at her. 

Arilo, one of the Partisans who was with them on Onderon, elbows him in the ribs. “Hey,” he mutters, “isn’t that your ex?” 

Belatedly, Bash remembers that a video he recorded of Shiri talking about civil engineering has been used as the foundation for planning several bridge and rail explosions. 

He kicks Arilo in the leg, just as Jordy says, “And this is Bash.” He sees Shiri look up, blink, look down again, her mouth twisted at the corner. “He has a whole slew of useful skills, but most importantly --”

“I can turn pretty much any scrap you’ve got lying around into something useful,” Bash says, absently. It’s the usual pitch. He’s thinking: he could, probably, get away with this. There have to be plenty of people named Bash in the galaxy. The rest of the team are decent; if he asks them not to make things weird, they won’t make things weird. He’s pretty sure he can get away with this. 

If Shiri still trusted him, she would have answered at least one of his messages, but she didn’t. He doesn’t hold it against her. He didn’t trust himself, and with good reason; why should she? Still, from her point of view, the fact that he’s here can’t look anything but bad. The fact that he’s changed his face looks worse.

If he can get away with this, he probably should.

But he misses her, and more to the point, maybe, he misses himself. Oh, man: he is real tired of being a stranger. 

“Grenades, for example,” Jordy is saying. “If you agree that the risk is worth taking, we can supply the operation with explosives for almost no cost --”

“I’m not as good with them as my sibling is, though,” Bash says, and Jordy turns, and shoots him a look: _seriously_ , another Clan Snekfruit story? _Now?_

Bash doesn’t care. He looks straight at Shiri, and says, “It’s a Snekfruit thing.”

Her head jerks up; her lekku snap straight. She stares back at him. 

If Bash was like Dax, he’d be blasting his thoughts to Shiri with everything he’s worth: _Please just trust me long enough to let me explain to you later. Just give me that long._

He tries to say it with his face instead, but it’s a face she’s never seen before, so he’s not sure how much of an impact it’s really going to have. 

Her gaze bores into him. He holds his breath, and waits for the axe to fall. Any second now, she’s going to tell everyone here that he’s a disguised clone, an Imperial spy, a Jedi-murdering brainwashed toy soldier, and then –

Then she closes her eyes, opens them again, and turns her head coolly back to Jordy. “Before we start talking about throwing around explosions, what about the conscripts working in that section of the mine? We won’t countenance any plan that doesn’t guarantee their escape.”

Bash lets out his breath. 

Next to him, Arilo whispers, “I _knew_ that was your ex!” 

**

“You changed your whole face,” Shiri says, flatly, “but you didn’t change your name.”

“Which right there should probably be enough to tell you that I’m not a spy,” agrees Bash (though technically, Bash had never been his name to begin with; the records all say CT-3313.) “It would be an incredibly stupid choice for a spy.”

“It’s a pretty stupid choice for anyone.”

“I mean, I’m not saying you’re wrong.”

They’re sitting at a back table on a crowded cantina. Bash knows enough about this kind of work, by now, to pick the sort of area where the acoustics are such that nobody else is going to hear them. In some ways, this kind of conversation can be just as private than an actual private room. 

Just as private, and safer. He’s already asking Shiri to take a lot on faith; it seems like a little bit of a stretch to follow that up with, ‘and let’s go back to your ship for a private talk!’ Not that she couldn’t take him in a fight, if it came to that, because she probably could. Still, it’s the principle of the thing. 

“Anyway,” Bash says, “it’s not like the Empire would ever send cannon fodder like us on a deep-cover op. That’s not what we were for.”

He can hear the bitterness in his voice. Shiri hears it too. She frowns, her eyes dark and wary, and then looks down at the new callouses on his hands. He was wearing his mobility extenders earlier, at the meeting, but he left them behind for this. After a moment, she says, “How’s H1F1, Bash?”

Bash sits straight up. He leans forward, and slams his hand on the table. “Kriffing _hells_ , Shiri, wouldn’t I like to know!”

That startles her out of her icy poise. “What?”

“As far as I can make out,” Bash says, “and believe me, it’s all still pretty fuzzy, I sent him off with Knight Tai. Okay, fine. She’s off by herself in some kind of deep Jedi exile, she needs _someone_ to talk to, but Dax is the only one who’s seen her since and he came back with nothing – look, I know she’s going through a lot, it’s been a kriffing bad time all around, but would even a simple status update be too much to ask? He’s probably got dust bunnies just – just _breeding_ in his chassis, I would be _more_ than happy to send her information about how to do his regular defragging if I just had a damn _address_ I knew she would check, but one galactic coup and suddenly everyone forgets how comms work --”

“Bash,” says Shiri. “Bash. _Bash._ ”

Bash blinks at her. Belatedly, he remembers that he really didn’t intend to be tactless about the fact that Shiri also took the excuse of a galactic coup to forgot how comms worked. He starts to frame an apology, but before he can do more than open his mouth, Shiri says, “Knight Tai’s _alive?_ ”

“Oh,” Bash says, as all the rest of it, briefly forgotten in his feelings about H1F1 – in the sheer relief of being able to _voice_ those feelings to someone else who actually cares about his buggy little DIY droid – comes piling down again. “Yeah. You must have heard – hells, you probably think we killed her, don’t you?” 

He sees her lekku flinch, makes a grimace of apology, and runs a hand back through his hair. “Well, it’s not like we didn’t try.”

“Bash,” says Shiri, like she’s about to stop him, like she doesn’t want to hear – but then, instead, makes a curt little gesture: go on.

“They put control chips in our heads,” he says. It’s the first time, actually, that he’s said it out loud, but he can’t stop to listen to the sound of the words; there’s too much else to tell. “It turns out we all had them. I don’t even know all of what they made us do. They told us to follow the Jedi, until, I guess, some muckety-muck decided that the Jedi were too dangerous, and then suddenly they told us to kill them instead. And we did it. We –” 

He can still remember seeing his brothers on the ground, bleeding out, and knowing that he had to kill the Jedi _first_ , that the lives of a few clones were far less important than that. He remembers believing it. They could have saved Cog, maybe, if they hadn’t had to believe it.

Did Shiri ever meet Cog? He can’t remember. “Cog died,” he says, anyway, because it’s important, and shouldn’t be elided. “Knight Tai killed him, fighting us off.”

Shiri’s face changes; Bash moves on, quickly. “But a couple of us – me, and I think maybe Target, too – we must have malfunctioned somehow. We’re pretty shoddy tech, when you think about it, yeah? Budget cuts on the production line.” He shakes out his hand and grins at his own grim joke rather than lingering on the memory of Target alternating between shooting Knight Tai, and shooting his brothers. “Anyway, it got us confused enough to not – this is the part that’s still not too clear, between the chip, and Jedi mind tricks, and Knight Tai’s whole Falleen thing. I remember bits and pieces, now. Dax says he thinks we faked her death. That rings some kind of a bell. But of course I couldn’t know that, with the chip still in my head. It wouldn’t have been safe for any of us to know any of this.”

He’s trying to keep his voice as steady and light as he can, doesn’t know how successful he’s being. Shiri’s eyes are intent on him. “You’re saying you got the chip out, then,” she says: a question disguised as a statement, and he nods.

“Dax figured it out. I don’t even know how. He got his own out, then mine, and I --” No point in talking about the months of useless vacillating. “-- I changed my face and ran. Maybe by now he’s gotten to the others. He left me the schematics, I can give you all the data --”

“Wait.” Shiri puts up a hand, her eyes widening. “You don’t have to --”

“Well, I kind of do,” says Bash.

“What I mean is that I believe you,” says Shiri, carefully. “It – the story makes sense.”

“Does it?” His fingers want to go back to the scar on his head. He puts his hands on the table, instead. “You’re ahead of me, then. It still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.” 

It’s been two and a half years. He hadn’t realized how many words he still had inside him about that day, waiting to come out, until there’s finally someone there to listen.

“They didn’t – we’re soldiers, you know? We all knew we might die, we all knew we might lose people we loved. I can make some kind of sense out of that. What I can’t get over is that they let us think we were people. We really did think that. And then they flipped a switch and it turned out we weren’t people after all, we’d never been people. You don’t care about whether a weapon loves the thing it’s pointed at. And the thing I don’t get – the thing I really don’t understand – is if we were weapons, why didn’t they just kriffing make us weapons? Why did they let us think we were people, and then take that away?” 

“Bash,” Shiri says. She blinks, rapidly. Her eyes are a little too bright. “You _are_ a person. It doesn’t matter what they did to you. They couldn’t – nobody can _take_ that from you.” 

Which is nice of her to say, and probably what she wants to believe. If you care about someone, you don’t want to think they’re not real. But deep down, if she really thought that – if she thought he was a real person, with the power to make some kind of choice between right and wrong – wouldn’t she have taken one of his calls? 

She didn’t, and she was smart not to, because it wasn’t true. 

But there’s no point in saying that, and hurting her more. He sighs, closes his eyes, and then – somewhat to his surprise – he feels her hand come down over his. It’s unexpected; it’s nice. He breathes. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, into the darkness. 

“For what?” She sounds almost angry. 

For not being a person, he thinks, but doesn’t say. For not being the person you would have needed me to be. He says: “Well, for dumping this all over you in the middle of other business, I guess. It’s not like you came here expecting this. It doesn’t really seem fair.” 

There’s a long pause, and then he feels Shiri’s hand withdraw. When Bash opens his eyes, her eyes are clear again, and she’s sitting calm and still – almost too still, her lekku as motionless as the rest of her. He doesn’t remember her being quite as good as that at shoving down her emotions, but they’ve all changed in the past few years. “I’ll admit,” she says, “I thought I had an idea what to expect when negotiating with the Partisans, but you – you weren’t it. Why _are_ you here?”

“To hurt the Empire.” Bash shrugs. “Isn’t that the reason why we’re all here?” 

“The reason I’m here is to help people,” Shiri says, a little sharply, and then takes a breath, modulates her voice, and adds, too carefully, “You used to want that too. If you want an introduction, somewhere else to go, I have contacts --”

Bash shakes his head. “I can’t.” His fingers rest on the table, stiff and clunky. He did used to want that. He still wants that. But – “The ones I really want to help, I can’t do anything for. Nobody would, right? We’re the face --” He grimaces, and passes a hand over his own face, as he remembers all over again that it’s not his anymore. “You know, the face of everything that went wrong. I don’t know how to help us. I know how to hurt the people who hurt us, that’s all.” 

He lets his hand drop, and looks at her, trying, once again, to project his sincerity recognizably onto his new face. “But Shiri, it means a lot to know _you’re_ still helping people. I’m glad we’re working with you on this, and can help you do that. I mean it.”

“Do you?” Shiri looks at him. “Are you willing to push for that? With your people?”

“Of course,” Bash says, without hesitation. “For sure.” 

She squares her shoulders. “All right, then.” Her lekku twitch. “All right.” A breath, and – he’s pretty sure it’s not quite trust he sees in her eyes, but it’s something. It’s better by far than nothing.

Then: “All right,” she says, for a third time. “We should talk about the refugees, then. But if we spend too much time together, your people – are they going to ask questions?”

“Well.” Bash feels himself flush, slightly. He really doesn’t remember getting embarrassed hardly ever, in his old life. Weird, how awkward everything got after the universe fell apart. “Uh, so, actually – you remember that video we took of you talking about the basics of civil engineering --”

("It’s called civil engineering for a reason, Bash,” she’d said, laughing. “If you’re hoping for military applications, you should probably talk to an actual military engineer.” 

And he’d said: "No ulterior motives, honest. I just want you to talk about the stuff makes your face light up like that. Trains? Bridges? Uh, aqueducts?”

“Oh,” she’d said, with affectionate sarcasm, “very smooth,” and he’d grinned at her. 

“You know I wouldn’t know where to even start with smooth. It’s a good face, is all. I like hearing you talk.”)

“-- well, you might have heard, on Onderon, we were doing a lot of sabotage on Imperial infrastructure and it seemed like it might be relevant that I used to, uh, I used to know a civil engineer –” 

Shiri’s face is now doing a number of complicated things. He can’t quite tell if ‘judgmental’ is one of them, but it seems reasonably likely. Bash puts his head in his hands. “Sorry,” he says, through his fingers. “Sorry. It’s just, you just explained things really well, and...”

“That,” she says, “might have been an even stupider move than continuing to use your own name.”

“Oh, yeah,” says Bash. “No one’s arguing about that.”

“But it gives us a good cover story for now,” Shiri says, very resolutely. “An old flame reigniting – that works fine. We can work with that.” 

Her fingers are folded together, very tightly, in her lap. She didn’t have to take his hand, earlier, to give him comfort, but she did. It was more than he had expected. He doesn’t expect it to happen again. 

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll follow your lead.”

**

The negotiations are a success, by everyone’s standards. Jordy and Arilo grumble about all the wasted time they spend meeting Shiri’s requirements for getting the refugees to safety, but the entertainment they get out of teasing Bash for his whirlwind revolutionary romance almost makes up for it. 

Bash grins and lets it happen. A good cover story is, after all, exactly what Shiri suggested. 

He asks one more favor of her, before they leave the sector, as they share a drink in the same cantina – one last date for the lovebirds, as both their teams imagine. 

“I meant it when I said I would give you the data about the chip. I’d like you to have it.”

Shiri’s brows draw down. “I told you I believed you. You don’t need to prove --”

“I have a copy,” Bash interrupts. “Dax has a copy. There’s one in an offsite data store with Yasmeen. As far as I know, that’s it. If something happened to either of us –”

Her guard is all the way up now. “What are you asking of me?” 

“Kriffing hells, Shiri,” Bash says, tired, “if I knew what to do, I would’ve done it already.” 

He regrets it a moment later – it’s himself he’s frustrated at, not her. “Sorry. I’m not trying to put anything on you. But – somebody needs to know, right? Somebody needs to know what they did to us, why we did what we did. The more people have that data, the more chance there is someone can do something with it, and even if they can’t --” 

He shrugs. “It just can’t be lost, that’s all. And right now I don’t have a lot of people to ask.”

If it’s lost, they’ll never have a chance to be anything other than what the GAR made them. He wants to know there will still be that chance, even if it doesn’t come until after they’re all dead. 

Shiri nods, slowly. “All right. That makes sense. I just – it feels like you’re giving me a lot of trust. I wasn’t expecting it.” She takes a breath. “But I’ll take it, Bash. Of course I will. And – if you change your mind, and you want to get out, do something else – you know the offer still stands.” 

“Sure,” says Bash. He doesn’t think he will, but it’s nice of her to offer. “If an emergency hits, I’ll reach out.” And then, after a beat: “Is it all right if I reach out if it’s not an emergency, too?”

Shiri hesitates. “I can’t …. promise to be a particularly constant correspondent,” she says. “We travel around so much, the refugees --”

He laughs, at that. “I spend most of my time these days in caves with no comms, so, yeah, I get you. No pressure.”

“But we went to the trouble of setting up a cover story,” Shiri says, and smiles, at last, small and a little wistful. “So I suppose we might as well use it.”

**

More missions. More contacts, more setup, many more grenades, and then suddenly there’s a day when they’re launching a full-blown attack on an Imperial facility – a factory outpost of the Department of Military Research – and it’s all hands on deck. That includes Bash. 

It’s not like he’s been avoiding this. He wants the satisfaction of striking a blow with his own hands as much as anyone else does. He’s a bad shot, is all. As long as he’s still being useful, it’s okay if he’s not first pick to go. 

It’s not like he’s been avoiding this, but once he’s there, watching the bored guards patrolling in their white armor – once he’s there, in cover, remembering Gerrera’s orders, shoot on sight before they can shoot you – once he’s there, he thinks that maybe he should have been.

Suddenly it’s like he’s in two places at once. Suddenly, he’s both the Partisan skulking on the ridge, and the soldier standing in front of the facility, and one of them chose to be here but still has shaking hands, and one of them has no capacity for doubt. 

It was so easy, in so many ways, to be the soldier. 

It’s the Partisan who follows Jordy and his crew around the side, with the team that’s planning to break in the back while the guards are distracted around the front. It’s the Partisan who watches as Jordy shoots the first patrolman they come across in the back, and the Partisan who uses his strength to help force down the door, and the Partisan who says, “That’s the control room – I’ll see what I can do in there,” while Arilo is methodically setting charges on all the expensive machinery that the Empire uses to manufacture prototypes of top-secret interrogation droids. 

But it’s neither the soldier nor the Partisan who comes face to face with a clone soldier in the control room. 

It’s Bash who stuns his brother at point-blank range, before he even has time to think about making a choice, and then pulls off his helmet and gags him – Gerrera said to shoot to kill, his orders were very clear – and then it’s just Bash who sinks down into the chair in the middle of the control room and tries to figure out what the hell he’s doing. 

He can’t afford this. He’s on a mission, and the mission’s important; he’s not going to let his comrades down. He connects his personal comm up to the port. Then he rolls up his sleeves and begins hacking his way into all-too-familiar systems – it’s been three years, you’d think they’d have changed some of the more infuriating bits of this file infrastructure by now, but that’s the way it always kriffing is in the Army, nothing ever changes – and by the time he’s shut off all the lights in the facility and opened all the doors that are supposed to be locked and locked all the doors that are supposed to be open and copied a whole bunch of folders of top-secret data that look like they’re probably important to somebody and then destroyed all the local copies just to give the Empire a bad day, he’s started to calm down a bit. 

There’s still plenty of noise going on outside the control room, but the clone soldier inside is stirring now, making noises through the gag and kicking out at his bonds. Almost without thinking about it, Bash throws him the hand sign to _shut up!_

There’s an astonished sort of silence. When Bash turns around, the clone soldier – his brother – is staring at his uncovered arms.

Bash was reasonably careful when he picked his tattoos. No helmets, no armor, no guns. Nothing that says GAR, and, therefore, nothing that says ‘clone,’ to almost everyone he’d ever expected to meet. 

But this stranger, his brother, looks at the cards and the knitting needles and the toolkit and the squad snekfruit, and see a pattern that nobody who wasn’t his brother could see. This stranger, his brother, can read the language patterns tattooed around his arm – signs that mean _Cog, Target, Knight Tai_ , but also _pilot, sniper, Jedi._

Then he hisses something else through the gag. Bash can’t quite make it out, but from the pattern of syllables, he thinks the word is _traitor!_

It feels like he’s been waiting to hear someone call him that ever since he changed his face. Now that he finally has, it honestly hurts less than he expected. Bash looks down at his brother, and lets the vowels of his own accent come through. “You’ve been betrayed,” he says, “but I’m not the traitor.” 

Then he stuns him again.

He can’t dally here much longer, or Jordy and Arilo are going to come find him. Still, they wouldn’t have expected him to be this fast; nobody would have been, who didn’t already know how the systems were organized. He has a little time. 

The old GAR computer systems haven’t been updated in years. Bash knows where to find the folders that nobody ever looks – old chore rosters and outdated disaster plans and shared documents where officers members collaborated on draft versions of joint reports (of the kind that Boomer had always inexplicably loved.) 

Years ago, he wouldn’t have known how to do this. But he’s been recruiting with Jordy for the past two years, and he’s learned some things he didn’t know before. 

Deep, deep in a folder full of outdated requisition forms that haven’t been required in a solid six years, he buries a video clip, one of the first ones H1F1 ever took: the cafeteria on the infirmary ward, hundreds of banged-up clones eating and talking together, in numbers that haven’t been seen since the fall of the Republic. Then a clip of Knight Tai, interposing her lightsaber in between Cog and a blaster shot. (H1F1 had been in good form that day. The angle on her is fantastic; she looks almost too heroic to be real.) Last, Boomer on a ground mission, signing back towards the rest of them: _Be quiet; tread cautiously; treacherous ground._

And then he leaves a comm address. 

This stranger, his brother, will almost certainly be the one to check the system when he wakes up. His brother will look and see what’s changed – what’s been deleted, and what’s been added. 

His brother will find the videos, and the address, and maybe he’ll tell his superiors.

Or maybe he’ll ignore it, and do nothing. 

Or maybe – just maybe – he’ll decide that the first thing he needs to do is ask questions. 

Maybe Bash can give him some answers. 

**

After that, he starts asking to be sent along on active sabotage missions. 

“Got himself a taste for blood at last!” Jordy says, half-approving, half-judgmental. “Well, don’t get yourself killed, Snekfruit, not when I’m getting you trained up.”

Bash grins, and says, “I’ve got no plans to.” It’s extremely true. He feels like he’s got more to live for than he has in years. “I miss the Holonet, that’s all. Hacking into Imperial systems is the best chance I’ve got to catch up on my stories. Do you know how much illegal media they’ve got on all those servers? Guarding those outposts is –” He catches himself, barely. “-- must be one of the most boring jobs in existence.” 

“I know you can’t resist a good story,” says Jordy, “but if you find Stormtrooper porn while you’re in there turning out the lights or whatever, I really don’t want to know about it.” 

“Ha,” says Bash, as he’s expected to, and reminds himself that he’s laughed at things that were less funny. 

He’s left his little data packages in three separate facilities before he gets his first bite. The message at the comm address is anonymous, suspicious, and scared. It’s one of the best things Bash has ever heard.

He’s still trying to figure out how to answer when he gets the by-now familiar mental tug: Dax, checking in, as he does now every six months or so. Usually it’s pretty brief, and Bash hasn’t done much to prolong the contact; hearing from his brother is the best feeling there is, but there’s always been too much he hasn’t wanted to say. Now, though – 

_DAX!_ It’s a kind of mental shout; if Dax’s contact was a tap on the shoulder, Bash’s response is a grab on both arms. _CREEPY GOOD TIMING?_

Dax’s surprise washes over him, along with something like a laugh. He’s gotten better at this, over the years, and his response comes as a clear, complete sentence: _Hey! I haven’t heard you this excited in a long time._

Bash sends him the equivalent of a string of exclamation points – like H1F1, he thinks, laughing at himself – and then amends it with a sense of danger. Voluntary danger, he tries to convey. Danger, if you’re okay with it. _CAN WE TALK? SECURE COMM?_

It’s a risk, trying to make direct contact. His messages so far have been safe because they’ve been innocuous. Anyone might have sent them. The things he needs to say to Dax, now – the ideas just barely starting to coalesce in his head, so bold they almost scare him – are the kinds of things that could get them both killed, in any number of ways. 

Dax has his dashing Pantoran spy, and the kids they’ve rescued. He has the Force and a family and a whole life that he’s built, independent and infinitely far from the vats of Kamino and the drills of the battlefield. The fact that he was able to imagine this for himself is almost more impressive, to Bash, than the fact that he’s achieved it. 

Bash left the army, but he hasn’t left, not really. Help his brothers, or avenge them: those have always been the choices, and he can’t see any others. No matter how he changes on the outside, the inside of him is always shaped like a clone soldier. 

Dax, though – Dax left, for real. Dax built something new. 

Is it fair, to ask him to put that at risk for the sake of something he left behind years ago? 

He doesn’t know how much of all this makes it out through the Force channel, but either way, Dax’s response is unhesitating: _Whatever you need. Tell me_. And he follows it up with a devastatingly clear image of a four-year-old child, waving a lightsaber around in a carefree fashion that is honestly and genuinely terrifying. _Danger isn’t new_. 

Bash laughs out loud. 

_Talk soon, Bash._

“Talk soon,” Bash says, out loud, to the fading feeling of the Force.

Maybe he should feel guilty, for dragging Dax back into this. Really probably he should. But all he really feels is the soaring, bubbling feeling – at long last – of _possibility._

** 

He sends a message to Dax, full of ideas and plans and all the things he’s learned from two years building networks with Jordy. _I need a medic_ , he writes. _If I can get them to you, I need your hands._

Dax writes back: _You’ve got them._

He sends a message to Shiri, and asks her about moving people, safely and secretly. _Don’t tell me anything that could compromise you,_ he writes. _But you’ve always been good at explaining the basics clearly._

Shiri writes back: _I knew you still wanted to help._

He sends a message to the angry anonymous trooper who followed the trail he left: _You know something is wrong, don’t you? You wouldn’t have reached out if you didn’t. I’m your brother, and I can help you._

The trooper writes back: _If you’re my brother, you’re a deserter. I should tell my superiors, and turn you in._

But he doesn’t, and neither does the next one, or the one after that.  
Bash goes on more missions. Sometimes, he shoots his brothers. He does his best not to kill them, but he is, after all, a Partisan, and he has a job to do. 

But he always ends up in the control room, and he always leaves a trail. 

As the months go by, he gets bolder. He makes his messages viral, sends them expanding through shared Imperial networks and careless communications. He leaves copies of the data about the chip embedded deep in ancient systems and encrypted with keys based on GAR hand-signs, the ones they never shared with officers: _keep your head down, this command’s a real bitch._

He guides his first trooper, by a careful, circuitous set of clues, to a drop point. He guides him to Dax, and that’s one.

Countless numbers to go, of course – countless still, even four years after the fall of the Republic – but one counts, too. Every one counts. 

This goes on, all told, for a little over a year, until the day that Bash takes a little too long.

They’re on Lothal, in the monorail control center, disrupting the transfer of imported materials from Capital City to the to the BlasTech weapons laboratory. The computers that manage the rail schedules are connected to the local Imperial garrison, which is a good opportunity for Bash,, but the rail system itself is managed by an outside contractor, and the file system isn’t anything like what he’s used to. Bash hastily uploads his now-standard video lure to upload over the connection to the garrison, then sets himself to the Partisan business of hacking the switches so the next two cargo trains will crash into each other instead of passing each other by. 

“Bash,” Jordy says, swinging into the door. “What the hell are you doing in here? We’re not on a leisure cruise here --”

It is at this inconvenient juncture that the computer hits its data transfer limit, rebels, and chucks the video back at Bash with an angry beep. 

“What the kriff is _that_?” snaps Jordy. “I swear, Snekfruit, if you really have been watching Stormtrooper porn in here –”

Knight Tai launches herself onto the screen, silently shouts “Cog!” and interposes herself between Cog and the blaster fire. Boomer makes the hand signs: _tread cautiously; treacherous ground._ The camera lurches, and shows the squad snekfruit, painted in bright colors on white trooper armor. 

This was, Bash remembers, irrelevantly, before they’d all gotten the tattoos. 

One thing about Jordy, and the work they do: they’re quick on the uptake. They look at the video, and then they look at Bash. “Snekfruit,” they say, again, and then, in tones of increasing fury: “Kriffing _Snekfruit._ ”

“Jordy,” says Bash, “it’s not --”

“Those creepy pictures you take of dead clones,” Jordy says. Their blaster is already up and pointed at him. “All those noun names. The way you have with Imperial computer systems, kriffing _hells_ , I knew there wasn’t any such thing as a Clan Snekfruit. Man of mystery, my ass!”

“I mean,” Bash says apologetically, hands in the air, “I didn’t actually lie to you very much.”

“Oh, great! Great answer!” 

“I haven’t betrayed Gerrera, or you, or anyone,” Bash says, edging backwards. “I get that it looks bad, and I’m sorry about that, but I’m not a spy. I told you I lost my family and I wanted revenge, that’s _true._ ”

“Right,” snarls Jordy, “it’s just that your family is thousands of brainwashed clones who are the first line of defense for the enemy, and you _lied_ about it. There’s nothing compromising about that at all.” They glare at Bash; as angry as they are, their hand is perfectly steady. “I _liked_ you, Snekfruit. You learned fast, you did good work. Maybe you’re telling the truth now. Maybe if you’d told the truth from the beginning, things would have been okay – we worked with a clone before, did you know that? From the 501st. It might have been all right. But you lied, and that means you can’t be trusted.”

They hesitate a moment, then add, “I’m not going to apologize. You did this to yourself.” 

Just as they pull the trigger, Bash jumps aside and claps his mobility extenders over the tip of the blaster. The mobility extenders collapse in a horrible smell of melting plastic; Jordy spits a curse, and Bash yanks his burning hand away and bulls past him out the door. 

It’s the middle of the night, but the spaceport’s not too far, and there’s usually a few ships around. His hand is screaming at him – these third-degree burns are definitely not going to _help_ his dex problems – but he runs, knowing that he might be stronger, but Jordy is more skilled, and if he catches up with him, Bash is definitely going to come out the worse for it. 

At least, he tells himself, with grim humor, if he’s killed by a friend today, it will be for a rational, absolutely intentional, non-brainwashed reason –

And just as he’s thinking that, he vaults the low wall of the spaceport and sees one of the most beautiful things he’s ever seen: the Jiri Wayfarer, parked placidly in the second spot, as if there was every reason in the world that it should be here. 

“Leeadra!” He bangs on the door, using all his considerable strength, and lets his accent hang out loud and broad, and prays to whatever Force there is that Leeadra is inside, and not out on the town, and hasn’t sold the ship in the past four years. “Leeadra! Let me in!” 

Jordy’s footsteps are coming up fast behind him. Just as he’s about to turn and fight, for whatever good it will do, the spaceport door behind him swings open.

“Who -” Leeadra begins, and Bash dives inside, shouting, “Shut the door, shut the door!”

Behind him, he hears the sound of the door closing, and takes a moment to just lie flat on the floor to catch his breath.  
“Uh, who is this exactly?” says an overwhelmingly familiar voice. 

Bash feels his eyes go wide. He looks up.

The person in front of him has a long braid of hair, and ear cuffs, and colorful clothes in vivid plaid. They have his face – or at least, the face that used to be his. They have a couple of raised eyebrows that he’d recognize anywhere in the world. 

Bash takes a breath. “Hey, Boomer,” he says, and sets about the business of getting to his feet. 

He sees Boomer’s eyes widen, in turn, as they look him up and down, taking in his stance, his voice. Recognizing him. _Recognizing_ him.

His new face creases in a smile that feels, for the first time in four years, completely familiar. 

He says: “Can a brother catch a ride?”


End file.
